2010.11.29

Last year I published a novel for National Novel Writing Month but because I am lazy and a terrible writer, I just wrote a script to write the novel for me. (The results were posted here: National Novel Writing Month.pl)

This year I did it again, and I’ve also published the code I used to write the novel. (See nanowrirobot on GitHub.)

The script needs a source to do it’s work. I did my original development by just pointing it at /usr/share/dict/words which creates some of the most beautiful gibberish you’ve ever seen. You can also just point it at a text file, and it’ll use the words in that. That’s what I did last time, and this time as well. Since this one is titled “Arduino: The Novel” it had better be about the Arduino, right? I ended up creating a word lists from the HomePage, Introduction, FAQ, and ArduinoBoardUno pages of the Arduino web site, and built a list of just under 1,000 words. The results were astounding…

Actually, it’s pretty terrible, unless you are a fan of random acts of writing. If you want some writing that makes sense, take a look at nanowrimo.org, where you can find information about novels written by real people.